Let us ignore the difference of opinion on whether you are a citizen of a state or a nation first. This is simply a matter of ideology, and we will never be able to agree on this single point.
The fact of the matter is I was not suggesting that one state should decide matters that only affect the people that live in another. You may note I was quite adamant that national rights should not trump state rights at all times. However, state rights should however take a back seat to matters of national importance. If the question affects everyone in New York, Nebraska, and Louisiana equally, then why should an average New Yorker have less of a say than an average Nebraskan? Especially if the question concerns how tax money is spent, since New York as a whole contributes significantly more than Louisiana to that pot.
Once again, I am not advocating complete dissolution of states rights. However, I will not agree that any one person's opinion should matter more or less simply because of where they live.
The GP is not saying he has clout against 300 million other Americans. Instead the idea seems to be that the 300 million other Americans deserve some say that can not be overridden by 1 million Americans that just happen to control a state. There needs to be a balance between the needs of the populace, and the needs of the states. You are arguing that states rights should trump the beliefs of many, many millions of Americans because of an ideology that has been in place for almost one and a half centuries. After all, what gives a few smaller states the right to completely ignore the will of the majority?
I will not argue that the smaller states do not deserve protection, as that is simply untrue. Clearly if if matters were decided population, then New York, California, and many other large states would get everything. However, please consider it from the other side. If half of the voters in the nation wish to make a decision that affects the ENTIRE nation, why should a small state be able to override them? Especially if the smaller states already have significant say in national policy by way of congress?
I don't see what point you are trying to make here. Yes, corporations do whatever they can to make profits. They would be quickly destroyed by their competitors should they do anything else. Of course Google is also a pretty large corporation, so they also do things some may find to be pretty bad.
This however, is in no way tied to the article being discussed. What we have here is a country arresting a citizen of another country, because one of a few hundred thousand posts to a service that person is partially in charge of monitoring did not agree with the laws of that country. It should not mater whether the site was google.com, or foobarvideos.com. They could have a dead puppy division for all I care, and this article would still be just as relevant.
Should this progress much further, all it will do is piss off Google, and pissing off Google is not something you should be very anxious to do in this day and age.
Belief or lack of belief is not a very convincing argument here. I would focus on the fact that the chart says BluRay/PS3. All that chart really tells you is that the PS3 has been selling about as well as can be expected.
I bought a PS3 in March of '07, and in that time I have watched exactly one BluRay movie on it. Even that was because a friend of mine was curious to see how it looked, and rented 300. I'll bite if someone shows some real numbers about software sales, instead of a roundabout way of saying 20 million people own a PS3.
The scenario you described is using a somewhat archaic approach. What is more likely to happen at this point is the router will be configured to begin dropping UDP traffic once it reaches a certain ratio of TCP traffic. Now this means that the total traffic on the network is slowed, but probably not as much as you are suggesting.
The affected applications, which are in fact addressed in the articles, are those applications that also rely on UDP. If your BT client is spamming UDP packets at 800kbps, and the router is allowing those packets through at a rate of 400kbps then your VoIP and games are also losing half of their data. Similarly, your BT data is also getting through at a rate of 1 packet for ever 2, thus the people receiving your packets are seeing some rather strange results.
Having spent quite a few hours playing LBP with 4 players I can straight off say that your post is completely off base. The one point you did get is the control scheme, it is certainly flaky, and could use a bit of work.
There is very little competitive content, the only actual competition going on is a race to see who can get the most points. The reward is a little trophy over your head in the last 5 seconds of the match. That said, it is without argument to your advantage to help the other players out. Not only does letting them die waste lives from the general pool, but also there are more than a few points where the camera will decide to focus on the lagging player, killing anyone who gets too far by off screen timer.
Then there is the killing monsters thing. There are maybe 20 or 30 killable monsters in the game, usually used to give you a moving obstacle that you can use as a platform to jump higher. These "monsters" look like something you'd put together from the spare parts in a kid's toy-box, which is quite obviously the theme they were going for in this game.
So yes, while the game does not quite meet the qualifications the article stated, it is certainly a lot more cooperative than what you described. As for obligatory "I'm with the in group" quip. I am a Slashdotter, I care about freedom, and I own a PS3. Just because a company is willing to take steps to protect their investments, does not mean I should deprive myself of enjoyment on the argument that it might, in some roundabout way, reduce the freedoms that everyone enjoys. If you do not want Sony to own your levels, don't post any, or play offline. Magically, the problem goes away. And before you go off on the tried and true, "You're a fanboy, you wouldn't understand." I own every single current gen console, with plenty of games for each, and I do most of my gaming on my PC. I also work for a company with some stake in the 360, so if anything I would be rooting for it.
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get the actual data of how DeCSS affected DVD sales, since DeCSS came out when DVD producers were just ramping up. We do see a drop from 4x growth to 2x growth, but the question remains, which is the anomalous result. It could be that the 4x increase from 1998 to 1999 is a matter of suppliers adapting to consumer demand from a slow start, on the other hand the 2x decrease could be the result of DeCSS.
If you've got an IT/Programming/Engineering degree you probably will not work at Best Buy, Circuit City or Apple stores. Chances are the people you were talking to are high school grads with a few tech courses under their belts, exactly the same as the ones the article was talking about.
Solaris 10 CD pack or DVD - 4GB x 4 for each flavor Ubuntu 8.04 CD - 700MB x 4 assuming you got x86 and x86_64 for both server and desktop Drivers - 2 GB assuming you decided to apt-get a few hundred packages Rock Band track packs - ~500MB x 6 if you got all the packs available.
All this adds up to 23GB. Even if you torrented all this to a 100% ratio you'd still only be below 50GB.
Now the contribution from your normal usage is much harder to calculate I don't know how much you surf, so I will base it on my own experience. On an average day when I go around to the random news sites, web comics, hot prons, WoW, work VPN, and youtube I rack up about 450MB of download and 50MB upload. This adds up to an additional 16GB per month.
Now unless you have 10 other people sharing your connection, or you simply neglected to mention the 50 movie torrents you have going, I would say it's time to figure out what in the world is causing your traffic to skyrocket like that.
Where do you get this six people number? I've heard everything from Georgia killing hundreds to thousands, but I can honestly say I haven't heard this magical six.
The Wikipedia time-line places the initial civilian casualties due to Georgian assault at somewhere between 1600 (Ossetia's numbers) and 100 (Georgia's numbers), which leads me to think the real numbers are around 850.
Granted, the Russians are not innocent fluffy bunnies here. Clearly they've done their own share of stupidity in this conflict, but I think Russia's claim of Western media bias checks out if you don't even know the civilian casualties GEORGIA reported.
Also, if Russia really planned some sort of attacks, do you really think there would be two military efforts instead of twenty that took the country in a similar fashion to what US did in Iraq?
You can of course do that. Hell, if you really wanted you could even do the other steps on one line too, but that's not quite what I was trying to illustrate with my example. Also, there is the fact that you're downloading data from the internet; It's a lot easier to resume when you have a partial file.
As for the -v option, I'm not sure about everyone else, but I simply feel better when I see signs of progress on my screen. It's a lot more relaxing to see a few thousand files scroll by than to sit there and wait while your operation finishes. Silence can, after all mean many things: it may have crashed, your SSH may have timed out, or any number of other nasties could have happened. True, it's not as much of a concern for tar, but to be fair, I do quite a bit of debugging for a huge and quirky program. For me an empty screen often means some very unpleasant problems.
THEN followed by: times./configure && make && make install x20 IN THE RIGHT ORDER
Plus however long it takes you to debug the eventual compile problems because one of those obscure libraries that only one program uses was installed earlier with the wrong version.
All said and done, I'd rather take my chances with package managers, thanks.
Let's be reasonable here. Sure, I have no trouble agreeing with your reasoning regarding Windows (Well, as long as you ignore the over dramatized scenario), but let's not play Linux up to be the divine answer to everything.
Just today, for instance, a co-worker had a problem with Ubuntu. She had just completed a fresh install and went to aptitude to find some packages, when it decided to simply return a blank line and exit. Now granted, your first thought may be, "How about a quick `apt-get update` just in case," but can you really expect that of everyone. Eventually I helped her but, but many people simply to not have the experience to handle everything they may encounter in day to day use.
Of course if everything works in Linux, then it can be as good or better than Windows, however I believe that it all comes down to how dirty you are willing to let your hands get. Most people using windows are not even aware that there is a command line interface for it. For Linux on the other hand, you have to try quite hard to avoid the terminal.
This all depends on what you consider "Just Fine." Sure open source is progressing, but it doing so much more slowly than it could be given the obvious merits of the model.
And I never said I'm willing to become evil. I do not subscribe to either group of thought, and in fact I do not believe either way is good or evil. Accepting to co-exist with things such as DRM would simply allow more people into the community without alienating them with a group's standard of good or evil. Trying that hard to stick to your beliefs in order to stick it to The Man will only make The Man use a solution you approve of even less. Speaking through eyes unclouded by vain hopes of a perfect world I say that's the best we can home for.
And for the last one? I honestly have no clue, maybe it would be a bad idea to let some companies use FOSS to make their products, but I'm sure there would be just as many that would use FOSS to make a better product at a tolerable price. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd much rather get a better product from a company I dislike, than a horrible product from a company that makes me feel good by providing a happy cheery product that could have been much improved.
I read the article quite differently. Instead of asking the open source community to bend over for the big man, it seems he is calling for both the corporations and the community to accept a few concessions.
I am sure most of us on this site want open source to continue growing. Unfortunately for that to happen we need more acceptance from the bigger companies with the deeper pockets. This means that if we want growth to continue at a good rate we have to accept that certain concepts that are contrary to our philosophy have a place in community projects. The alternative is that projects that could benefit from going open source will not be able to, resulting in higher costs for the consumer, and less work dedicated to projects.
I truly hope you are just a poor attempt at a troll. As strange as it may sound, but if your books don't suck they'll sell anyway. Trust me when I say you are far from being "one of the few readers of books left in the world." The rather huge and popular bookstore on my block can attest to that. Copyright or no I would still buy books there. Sure, I may be able to download them just as easily, but what if I want to read them on the subway/bus? During lunch? Hell, even in bed?
This is coming from someone who reads more on a screen than 99% of the world. For the rest of the world reading a novel on a computer would be even more of a ridiculous idea. In summary, books will be the last thing to suffer from removing copyright simply because the people who buy books do so because they love reading. Otherwise they go to the library.
Averaging 85 on a 750 mile stretch of road is vastly different from averaging 90 on a 2800 mile stretch of road. I've done the former myself on several occasions, but I can barely do 75 average on a 1500 mile trip. One question is location. If you're driving from middle-of-nowhere, USA to edge-of-nowhere, USA you can probably average 150 if you tried, but these people had to drive though states where even thinking of averaging 90 would put you behind bars. I mean just look at the numbers stated. Quite often they would go upwards of 150 miles. If it was truly that easy why is it they only managed a 90? Also there is a length factor. Even with two drivers you're still in the car for 30 hours with not a wink of sleep. By the time you're 10-15 hours into the drive slowing down would begin to sound like a mighty good idea.
Also, driving across the country 4 times in 2 weeks means an average of 84 hours per trip. Once you subtract sleeping 8 hours a day you're down to a 56 hour trip, which is nearly twice the record. Even doing it in 1 week is a 42 hour trip. A full 11 hours short of the record, which gives you a full 8 hours to sleep, and still be 3 hours off.
That said I'm not saying people should go out and do this now. This guy practiced and prepared for this for ages, and even then it was still stupidly dangerous. Just don't make it out to be as simple as your 750 mile drives. An undertaking like this is on a whole other level of magnitude.
I have to agree with you on your WASD vs Stick opinion to a point. If you were at that high a level it would certainly be better to have two full degrees of freedom than 8 possible directions of movement. That said there are other benefits of using a keyboard/mouse over the stick. The design of most controllers restricts the number of buttons you can hit within a certain reaction window. If using a controller for instance you usually have the stick itself, and two or three shoulder buttons easily accessible. Anything else requires extra hand movement. When using WASD though, you have easy access to at the very least 3 but up to 16 extra buttons. Since several of these could easily be used as modifiers the scheme could effectively allow you thirty or forty extra commands. Similarly with a mouse you will usually have at least 5 buttons ready for instant access if you were to count the scroll wheel as a button.
Obviously this all depends on your dexterity of the user the design of a name. There are people who may not be able to take advantage of the extra keyboard buttons, and there are games that are specifically designed for one control scheme or the other.
I actually found Lair to be pretty decent once I got into it. Then I first got the game I was spitting an swearing with the best of them. The dragon would always go in the wrong directions, the dash and flip commands did not work, and it was a generally bad experience. After this I put the controller down for a few days and left it alone. Somewhat later, out of boredom, I picked it up again and I found to my surprise that the controls felt a lot smoother. No longer was I being pushed in random directions, and now I could get the special commands working most of the time. Finally, just last night I sat down to play yet again and it was honestly quite fun. I really got the hang of figuring out what I need to do, and started to get truly sucked into the story. I think enough has been said about the graphics, which are quite impressive, though not nearly enough has been said about the sound and music which are both far beyond what you are used to from such games.
The general impression I got was one echoed by the guy at the store. It's a tech demo disguised as a game. It did a pretty good job introducing some new concepts (For the PS3 at least) and stood well enough on its own. Later on I'm sure there will be games with a similar control scheme, and they want people to get used to it. That said it wasn't a horrible experience some are playing it up to be. I do wonder if these people even bothered to get the game before opening up their cans of napalm, or if they just read the IGN review and took it as the word of god.
I think you failed your basic reading comprehension test. No where in any of my posts did I say that Nintendo consoles have bad games no one should like. Fortunately I understand that your little brain may not truly grasp the concept that your opinion is not the end all of the universe, and that not everyone is obligated to share your beliefs so I will explain. What I did say was they do not have games EVERYONE will like, there is simply no perfect game or perfect system. The same can be said for each and any gaming platform in the world. I do not like Smash Brothers, I do not like Mario Cart or Mario anything really, and I do not like Meteroid. If I don't even like the flagship games, is it that hard to grasp that I might not like the majority of Nintendo games? Sure there may be a few that I would like should I actually dig though the multitudes of hype and reviews about Pokemon Deulxe Ultra Happy Pink Bend Over And Buy The 500th Version Of Our Game, but that would honestly take a lot more effort than just opening the PS2 reviews page of IGN and seeing many of the games I like gracing the top of the list.
Find me a decent Final Fantasy game for the GameCube or Wii (And please don't start spouting about the older system emulator, I've played those though too much on PC emulators to even consider going back to a console for them.) How about a playable RTS or TBS? Any MMOs? How about a really pretty shooter where I can feel amazed at the minute detail in a crawling exploding monster before it kills me?
P.S. Why don't you take your trolling at stick it up your 107076th asshole? If you want to piss over UIDs first have one that's somewhat impressive, next find someone who would be impressed.
Cute assumption. Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but I am bored. Though I'm not the most hardcore gamer, I own PS3 and 360 both of which have games I want, or in the PS3 case will have when Sony gets it's ass in gear and starts releasing some of those cool titles. Then of course my PC which is in fact my primary gaming rig. With Wii on the other hand, I have played several titles at friend's houses during parties and have not seen a game I can sit down and lose myself in for a few hours/days (Yes, Zelda included). That said, I have been thinking of getting the Wii just so the family could also have a few games they can enjoy. If there comes a day when I walk into a store and it's just sitting on the shelves I may decide to grab it.
Finally, I doubt a Sony shill would ever suggest emulators as a valid replacement. Strange as it may seem there really are people in this world that don't fall into the casual gamer area. Is it that big a stretch to believe that those people would not like a console not designed and marketed toward them?
Slashdot Mirror
Russian and Polish plates are a very common sight in the US. After all, what better way to travel over the Atlantic than by car.
Let us ignore the difference of opinion on whether you are a citizen of a state or a nation first. This is simply a matter of ideology, and we will never be able to agree on this single point.
The fact of the matter is I was not suggesting that one state should decide matters that only affect the people that live in another. You may note I was quite adamant that national rights should not trump state rights at all times. However, state rights should however take a back seat to matters of national importance. If the question affects everyone in New York, Nebraska, and Louisiana equally, then why should an average New Yorker have less of a say than an average Nebraskan? Especially if the question concerns how tax money is spent, since New York as a whole contributes significantly more than Louisiana to that pot.
Once again, I am not advocating complete dissolution of states rights. However, I will not agree that any one person's opinion should matter more or less simply because of where they live.
The GP is not saying he has clout against 300 million other Americans. Instead the idea seems to be that the 300 million other Americans deserve some say that can not be overridden by 1 million Americans that just happen to control a state. There needs to be a balance between the needs of the populace, and the needs of the states. You are arguing that states rights should trump the beliefs of many, many millions of Americans because of an ideology that has been in place for almost one and a half centuries. After all, what gives a few smaller states the right to completely ignore the will of the majority?
I will not argue that the smaller states do not deserve protection, as that is simply untrue. Clearly if if matters were decided population, then New York, California, and many other large states would get everything. However, please consider it from the other side. If half of the voters in the nation wish to make a decision that affects the ENTIRE nation, why should a small state be able to override them? Especially if the smaller states already have significant say in national policy by way of congress?
I don't see what point you are trying to make here. Yes, corporations do whatever they can to make profits. They would be quickly destroyed by their competitors should they do anything else. Of course Google is also a pretty large corporation, so they also do things some may find to be pretty bad.
This however, is in no way tied to the article being discussed. What we have here is a country arresting a citizen of another country, because one of a few hundred thousand posts to a service that person is partially in charge of monitoring did not agree with the laws of that country. It should not mater whether the site was google.com, or foobarvideos.com. They could have a dead puppy division for all I care, and this article would still be just as relevant.
Should this progress much further, all it will do is piss off Google, and pissing off Google is not something you should be very anxious to do in this day and age.
Belief or lack of belief is not a very convincing argument here. I would focus on the fact that the chart says BluRay/PS3. All that chart really tells you is that the PS3 has been selling about as well as can be expected.
I bought a PS3 in March of '07, and in that time I have watched exactly one BluRay movie on it. Even that was because a friend of mine was curious to see how it looked, and rented 300. I'll bite if someone shows some real numbers about software sales, instead of a roundabout way of saying 20 million people own a PS3.
The scenario you described is using a somewhat archaic approach. What is more likely to happen at this point is the router will be configured to begin dropping UDP traffic once it reaches a certain ratio of TCP traffic. Now this means that the total traffic on the network is slowed, but probably not as much as you are suggesting.
The affected applications, which are in fact addressed in the articles, are those applications that also rely on UDP. If your BT client is spamming UDP packets at 800kbps, and the router is allowing those packets through at a rate of 400kbps then your VoIP and games are also losing half of their data. Similarly, your BT data is also getting through at a rate of 1 packet for ever 2, thus the people receiving your packets are seeing some rather strange results.
Having spent quite a few hours playing LBP with 4 players I can straight off say that your post is completely off base. The one point you did get is the control scheme, it is certainly flaky, and could use a bit of work.
There is very little competitive content, the only actual competition going on is a race to see who can get the most points. The reward is a little trophy over your head in the last 5 seconds of the match. That said, it is without argument to your advantage to help the other players out. Not only does letting them die waste lives from the general pool, but also there are more than a few points where the camera will decide to focus on the lagging player, killing anyone who gets too far by off screen timer.
Then there is the killing monsters thing. There are maybe 20 or 30 killable monsters in the game, usually used to give you a moving obstacle that you can use as a platform to jump higher. These "monsters" look like something you'd put together from the spare parts in a kid's toy-box, which is quite obviously the theme they were going for in this game.
So yes, while the game does not quite meet the qualifications the article stated, it is certainly a lot more cooperative than what you described. As for obligatory "I'm with the in group" quip. I am a Slashdotter, I care about freedom, and I own a PS3. Just because a company is willing to take steps to protect their investments, does not mean I should deprive myself of enjoyment on the argument that it might, in some roundabout way, reduce the freedoms that everyone enjoys. If you do not want Sony to own your levels, don't post any, or play offline. Magically, the problem goes away. And before you go off on the tried and true, "You're a fanboy, you wouldn't understand." I own every single current gen console, with plenty of games for each, and I do most of my gaming on my PC. I also work for a company with some stake in the 360, so if anything I would be rooting for it.
Ask, and ye shall receive:
http://www.dvdinformation.com/news/press/CES010807.htm
Sales of DVDs began in 3rd quarter of 1997.
DeCSS was released on Oct 9, 1999.
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get the actual data of how DeCSS affected DVD sales, since DeCSS came out when DVD producers were just ramping up. We do see a drop from 4x growth to 2x growth, but the question remains, which is the anomalous result. It could be that the 4x increase from 1998 to 1999 is a matter of suppliers adapting to consumer demand from a slow start, on the other hand the 2x decrease could be the result of DeCSS.
If you've got an IT/Programming/Engineering degree you probably will not work at Best Buy, Circuit City or Apple stores. Chances are the people you were talking to are high school grads with a few tech courses under their belts, exactly the same as the ones the article was talking about.
Something doesn't add up there:
Solaris 10 CD pack or DVD - 4GB x 4 for each flavor
Ubuntu 8.04 CD - 700MB x 4 assuming you got x86 and x86_64 for both server and desktop
Drivers - 2 GB assuming you decided to apt-get a few hundred packages
Rock Band track packs - ~500MB x 6 if you got all the packs available.
All this adds up to 23GB. Even if you torrented all this to a 100% ratio you'd still only be below 50GB.
Now the contribution from your normal usage is much harder to calculate I don't know how much you surf, so I will base it on my own experience. On an average day when I go around to the random news sites, web comics, hot prons, WoW, work VPN, and youtube I rack up about 450MB of download and 50MB upload. This adds up to an additional 16GB per month.
Now unless you have 10 other people sharing your connection, or you simply neglected to mention the 50 movie torrents you have going, I would say it's time to figure out what in the world is causing your traffic to skyrocket like that.
Where do you get this six people number? I've heard everything from Georgia killing hundreds to thousands, but I can honestly say I haven't heard this magical six.
The Wikipedia time-line places the initial civilian casualties due to Georgian assault at somewhere between 1600 (Ossetia's numbers) and 100 (Georgia's numbers), which leads me to think the real numbers are around 850.
Granted, the Russians are not innocent fluffy bunnies here. Clearly they've done their own share of stupidity in this conflict, but I think Russia's claim of Western media bias checks out if you don't even know the civilian casualties GEORGIA reported.
Also, if Russia really planned some sort of attacks, do you really think there would be two military efforts instead of twenty that took the country in a similar fashion to what US did in Iraq?
You stopped a bit early. I believe the proper answer to your question is "Since FFVII"
You can of course do that. Hell, if you really wanted you could even do the other steps on one line too, but that's not quite what I was trying to illustrate with my example. Also, there is the fact that you're downloading data from the internet; It's a lot easier to resume when you have a partial file.
As for the -v option, I'm not sure about everyone else, but I simply feel better when I see signs of progress on my screen. It's a lot more relaxing to see a few thousand files scroll by than to sit there and wait while your operation finishes. Silence can, after all mean many things: it may have crashed, your SSH may have timed out, or any number of other nasties could have happened. True, it's not as much of a concern for tar, but to be fair, I do quite a bit of debugging for a huge and quirky program. For me an empty screen often means some very unpleasant problems.
Unfortunately it's not nearly as easy to type: ... ... x20
wget http://blahblah/dep1.tar.gz
wget http://foobar/dep2.tar.gz (404 Sigh)
wget http://woobar/dep2.tar.gz
wget ftp://wowowow/dep2.1.tar.gz
Followed by:
tar -zxvf files.tgz x 20
THEN followed by: ./configure && make && make install x20 IN THE RIGHT ORDER
times
Plus however long it takes you to debug the eventual compile problems because one of those obscure libraries that only one program uses was installed earlier with the wrong version.
All said and done, I'd rather take my chances with package managers, thanks.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me!
Ubuntu, Slackware, SUSE, Knoppix, Mandiva, Yellow Dog Linux...
Let's be reasonable here. Sure, I have no trouble agreeing with your reasoning regarding Windows (Well, as long as you ignore the over dramatized scenario), but let's not play Linux up to be the divine answer to everything.
Just today, for instance, a co-worker had a problem with Ubuntu. She had just completed a fresh install and went to aptitude to find some packages, when it decided to simply return a blank line and exit. Now granted, your first thought may be, "How about a quick `apt-get update` just in case," but can you really expect that of everyone. Eventually I helped her but, but many people simply to not have the experience to handle everything they may encounter in day to day use.
Of course if everything works in Linux, then it can be as good or better than Windows, however I believe that it all comes down to how dirty you are willing to let your hands get. Most people using windows are not even aware that there is a command line interface for it. For Linux on the other hand, you have to try quite hard to avoid the terminal.
This all depends on what you consider "Just Fine." Sure open source is progressing, but it doing so much more slowly than it could be given the obvious merits of the model.
And I never said I'm willing to become evil. I do not subscribe to either group of thought, and in fact I do not believe either way is good or evil. Accepting to co-exist with things such as DRM would simply allow more people into the community without alienating them with a group's standard of good or evil. Trying that hard to stick to your beliefs in order to stick it to The Man will only make The Man use a solution you approve of even less. Speaking through eyes unclouded by vain hopes of a perfect world I say that's the best we can home for.
And for the last one? I honestly have no clue, maybe it would be a bad idea to let some companies use FOSS to make their products, but I'm sure there would be just as many that would use FOSS to make a better product at a tolerable price. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd much rather get a better product from a company I dislike, than a horrible product from a company that makes me feel good by providing a happy cheery product that could have been much improved.
I read the article quite differently. Instead of asking the open source community to bend over for the big man, it seems he is calling for both the corporations and the community to accept a few concessions.
I am sure most of us on this site want open source to continue growing. Unfortunately for that to happen we need more acceptance from the bigger companies with the deeper pockets. This means that if we want growth to continue at a good rate we have to accept that certain concepts that are contrary to our philosophy have a place in community projects. The alternative is that projects that could benefit from going open source will not be able to, resulting in higher costs for the consumer, and less work dedicated to projects.
I truly hope you are just a poor attempt at a troll. As strange as it may sound, but if your books don't suck they'll sell anyway. Trust me when I say you are far from being "one of the few readers of books left in the world." The rather huge and popular bookstore on my block can attest to that. Copyright or no I would still buy books there. Sure, I may be able to download them just as easily, but what if I want to read them on the subway/bus? During lunch? Hell, even in bed?
This is coming from someone who reads more on a screen than 99% of the world. For the rest of the world reading a novel on a computer would be even more of a ridiculous idea. In summary, books will be the last thing to suffer from removing copyright simply because the people who buy books do so because they love reading. Otherwise they go to the library.
Averaging 85 on a 750 mile stretch of road is vastly different from averaging 90 on a 2800 mile stretch of road. I've done the former myself on several occasions, but I can barely do 75 average on a 1500 mile trip. One question is location. If you're driving from middle-of-nowhere, USA to edge-of-nowhere, USA you can probably average 150 if you tried, but these people had to drive though states where even thinking of averaging 90 would put you behind bars. I mean just look at the numbers stated. Quite often they would go upwards of 150 miles. If it was truly that easy why is it they only managed a 90? Also there is a length factor. Even with two drivers you're still in the car for 30 hours with not a wink of sleep. By the time you're 10-15 hours into the drive slowing down would begin to sound like a mighty good idea.
Also, driving across the country 4 times in 2 weeks means an average of 84 hours per trip. Once you subtract sleeping 8 hours a day you're down to a 56 hour trip, which is nearly twice the record. Even doing it in 1 week is a 42 hour trip. A full 11 hours short of the record, which gives you a full 8 hours to sleep, and still be 3 hours off.
That said I'm not saying people should go out and do this now. This guy practiced and prepared for this for ages, and even then it was still stupidly dangerous. Just don't make it out to be as simple as your 750 mile drives. An undertaking like this is on a whole other level of magnitude.
I have to agree with you on your WASD vs Stick opinion to a point. If you were at that high a level it would certainly be better to have two full degrees of freedom than 8 possible directions of movement. That said there are other benefits of using a keyboard/mouse over the stick. The design of most controllers restricts the number of buttons you can hit within a certain reaction window. If using a controller for instance you usually have the stick itself, and two or three shoulder buttons easily accessible. Anything else requires extra hand movement. When using WASD though, you have easy access to at the very least 3 but up to 16 extra buttons. Since several of these could easily be used as modifiers the scheme could effectively allow you thirty or forty extra commands. Similarly with a mouse you will usually have at least 5 buttons ready for instant access if you were to count the scroll wheel as a button.
Obviously this all depends on your dexterity of the user the design of a name. There are people who may not be able to take advantage of the extra keyboard buttons, and there are games that are specifically designed for one control scheme or the other.
I actually found Lair to be pretty decent once I got into it. Then I first got the game I was spitting an swearing with the best of them. The dragon would always go in the wrong directions, the dash and flip commands did not work, and it was a generally bad experience. After this I put the controller down for a few days and left it alone. Somewhat later, out of boredom, I picked it up again and I found to my surprise that the controls felt a lot smoother. No longer was I being pushed in random directions, and now I could get the special commands working most of the time. Finally, just last night I sat down to play yet again and it was honestly quite fun. I really got the hang of figuring out what I need to do, and started to get truly sucked into the story. I think enough has been said about the graphics, which are quite impressive, though not nearly enough has been said about the sound and music which are both far beyond what you are used to from such games.
The general impression I got was one echoed by the guy at the store. It's a tech demo disguised as a game. It did a pretty good job introducing some new concepts (For the PS3 at least) and stood well enough on its own. Later on I'm sure there will be games with a similar control scheme, and they want people to get used to it. That said it wasn't a horrible experience some are playing it up to be. I do wonder if these people even bothered to get the game before opening up their cans of napalm, or if they just read the IGN review and took it as the word of god.
Though not really related to anything, I'll see your "Order of Magnitude" and raise you a "Mathematical Base".
I think you failed your basic reading comprehension test. No where in any of my posts did I say that Nintendo consoles have bad games no one should like. Fortunately I understand that your little brain may not truly grasp the concept that your opinion is not the end all of the universe, and that not everyone is obligated to share your beliefs so I will explain. What I did say was they do not have games EVERYONE will like, there is simply no perfect game or perfect system. The same can be said for each and any gaming platform in the world. I do not like Smash Brothers, I do not like Mario Cart or Mario anything really, and I do not like Meteroid. If I don't even like the flagship games, is it that hard to grasp that I might not like the majority of Nintendo games? Sure there may be a few that I would like should I actually dig though the multitudes of hype and reviews about Pokemon Deulxe Ultra Happy Pink Bend Over And Buy The 500th Version Of Our Game, but that would honestly take a lot more effort than just opening the PS2 reviews page of IGN and seeing many of the games I like gracing the top of the list.
Find me a decent Final Fantasy game for the GameCube or Wii (And please don't start spouting about the older system emulator, I've played those though too much on PC emulators to even consider going back to a console for them.) How about a playable RTS or TBS? Any MMOs? How about a really pretty shooter where I can feel amazed at the minute detail in a crawling exploding monster before it kills me?
P.S. Why don't you take your trolling at stick it up your 107076th asshole? If you want to piss over UIDs first have one that's somewhat impressive, next find someone who would be impressed.
Cute assumption. Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but I am bored. Though I'm not the most hardcore gamer, I own PS3 and 360 both of which have games I want, or in the PS3 case will have when Sony gets it's ass in gear and starts releasing some of those cool titles. Then of course my PC which is in fact my primary gaming rig. With Wii on the other hand, I have played several titles at friend's houses during parties and have not seen a game I can sit down and lose myself in for a few hours/days (Yes, Zelda included). That said, I have been thinking of getting the Wii just so the family could also have a few games they can enjoy. If there comes a day when I walk into a store and it's just sitting on the shelves I may decide to grab it.
Finally, I doubt a Sony shill would ever suggest emulators as a valid replacement. Strange as it may seem there really are people in this world that don't fall into the casual gamer area. Is it that big a stretch to believe that those people would not like a console not designed and marketed toward them?